Adult learning is more than alternative education, self-help, self-study, or training. Self-directed inquiry can free you from the cultural traps of today’s postmodern world. When you think for yourself, you take control of your life. Intellectual ability and critical thinking soon become substitutes for paper credentials. Simply stated aggressive learning is the most practical guide to a passionately rewarding life.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

The universe is visibly menacing.
Our lives were made possible only because of freakish cosmic catastrophes. Our
lives are short and fraught with danger, which makes reality scary. This is why
we require a significant measure of illusion in order to cope with the ruthless
nature of existence.

We seldom acknowledge that
escape is a crucial reason for culture, but it’s easy to demonstrate. Many
small children, for example, buffer reality by adopting security blankets
because life is frightening to them. In the same way, culture helps to shelter
us from the stark aspects of reality because we abhor chaos. Park this idea for
the moment.

Now try this: Find a
comfortable place to relax, and think about how, at this very moment, the earth
is spinning on its axis at the rate of 1,040 miles per hour, while
simultaneously speeding around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. The sun is
traveling at 483,000 miles per hour around the galaxy, and the galaxy itself is
moving at 1.3 million miles per hour.

So, if you drive two
miles to the grocery store, determining how far you have actually traveled in
the cosmos is complicated. When you consider the facts of our travels in space,
it’s not unusual to feel the need to grab hold of something. In addition, wondering
where all of this wayfaring is taking us could drive you insane, if figuring it
out were to become too important to your sense of curiosity.

We are blazing through the
heavens at warp speed, going nowhere fast, in a universe demonstrably hostile
to life, favoring chaos and chance over order. The membrane of observable
conditions for organic life in the cosmos is paper thin and rarer than a precious
jewel. Our lives represent flickering sparks in eternal darkness, and yet, so
much of the precious time we are alive, our cultures are at war over arbitrary folk
narratives that are, as often as not, patently absurd.

Now let’s un-park the
notion of culture as a shelter from reality. In 1974, cultural anthropologist Ernest
Becker published The Denial of Death,
for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Multiple readings of his book offer a never-ending
supply of insights into how our lives are profoundly affected by the fact that
we are mortal.

Becker observed that
embedded beneath our consciousness is a smoldering neurosis, a deep-seated fear
of death, and that much of our conscious and unconscious lives are spent in
avoidance of, or in reaction to, this condition. Such behavior suggests that unfiltered
reality is a burden too harsh to bear without meaningful diversion. We drive
ourselves intentionally blind, Becker said, “With social games, psychological
tricks and personal preoccupations so far removed from reality that they are
forms of madness.”

Further, we tranquilize
ourselves with trivia, become creative as a social license for an escape
through the formation of respectable obsessions, and search desperately for existential
preferences. This explains, in part, why the metaphorical cousins of death,
change, uncertainty, and otherness upset us so easily. Mortality, Becker
maintained, is humanity’s Achilles Heel because our uneasiness renders us tragically
susceptible to folly and manipulation.

Simply put, the human
condition is all about management of our mortality because chronic anxiety is
inevitable for creatures smart enough to know that death is a relentless
stalker, a situation that gets to the heart of the notion of authenticity. To
quote Becker, “It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live
dooms us to a life that is never really ours.”

This brings me to The Worm at the Core by Sheldon Solomon,
Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. These psychologists have continued Becker’s
work, having spent decades researching how our lives are influenced by our
mortality and how our not being aware of this reality causes anxiety.

Known as terror management theory, their work shows
definitively how we depend on self-esteem, group identity, and the shelter of
consensus to keep thoughts of our inevitable impermanence at bay. It
illustrates how worldviews are fragile, psychosomatic constructions that render
us feeling unprotected simply by the very existence of opposing views.

Through membership, our
respective cultures offer us a pathway to symbolic immortality by nature of
their long-term existence. When our worldviews are threatened, we feel vulnerable,
and thus we come together as a self-protective force against existential
threats. We are emotionally rewarded by illusions of security, even when our
actions lead to conflict.

The authors of The Worm at the Core write, “When
confronted with reminders of death, we react by criticizing and punishing those
who oppose or violate our beliefs, and praising and rewarding those who support
or uphold our beliefs.”

The more you study terror
management theory, the more apparent it becomes just how seriously flawed our
species is when it comes to dealing with uncensored reality and otherness,
especially otherness. It’s almost as
if we have been neurologically wired to pay an awful emotional price for being intelligent,
for always being aware on some level that we are going to die.

How unfortunate it is for
our species that hatred proves to be an acceptable distraction—a readily
available substitute for the kind of reality that genuine thoughtfulness could
provide. What else could we assume of a creature that derives comfort and
solace from a purposeful pursuit of ignorance, since the truth about vitally
important matters means much less than the emotional shelter of collective
illusion?

When people perceive that
their worldview represents truth incarnate, then evidence that they are wrong
about anything deemed important carries a mortal threat because it suggests
that they could be wrong about everything. What if their most cherished
political views or the fundamental claims of their religion are untrue? After
all, there are literally thousands of divergent belief systems. They can’t all
be true, and because they can’t, the emotional stakes among true believers are
apt to skyrocket during periods of rapid change, insecurity, and unrest.

This is why social issues
like same-sex marriage are considered earthshaking events, and it’s why so many
people act as if the legalization of gay marriage is a metaphor for the end of
the world. Indeed, anything contrary to their deep sense of reality feels like a
mortal blow to their sense of existential security.

The right of same-sex
couples to marry is a human rights issue and a recognition that homosexuality
has always been a part of the human condition. In time, most people we will come
to realize that homophobia amounts to a moral outrage, that for centuries
millions of our fellow citizens have been forced to live in the shadows, afraid
to be who they are, unable to honestly express their feelings or make their
true affinities known.

It’s time for our cultureto awaken from itsfear-based prejudice, which up to the present has denied that homosexuals
exist or, in some cases, have a right to exist. Belonging to a culture that
disapproves of human biology is like a people vowing to disbelieve the wind
because they don’t like the way it feels on their face. A preferred reality is
no longer an option. Same-sex attraction is not unique to our species. What’s
new is that the curtains on this human biological trait are finally thrown open
and continued bigotry and denial are not going to close them.

I’ve been studying the
psychology of mortality for decades, and I’m convinced that mankind will never
achieve adulthood until it is commonly understood how fragile our human psyche
is with regard to our mortality and how we are predisposed to act aggressively
toward out-groups when our beliefs
are challenged. The political implications for fully understanding this psychological
behavior is existentially explosive and could lead to incredible improvements
in human relations.

Ernest Becker nailed it
when he observed that leaving the knowledge of human behavior to experts leads
to “a general imbecility.” This doesn’t mean that we should ignore the science
of human behavior. It means that we need to study it as if the business of
being a human being matters to us as individuals as much as it does to
scientists.

A preferred reality may
indeed offer us psychological shelter—and we might be wise to admit that we
require some buffering—but if we remain forever unaware of how our need for agreed-upon
illusions affects our relationships with others, we can never truly experience
freedom and we will never achieve what we like to think of as civilization.